


sometimes you gotta bleed to know, that you're alive and have a soul

by robinlikeitshot



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU, Red Robin (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Bruce is Not as Great but He gets There, Cutting, Gen, Good Sibling Dick Grayson, Growing Up, Jack and Janet Drake's C+ Parenting, Mental Health Issues, Self-Harm, Tim Drake is Red Robin, Tim Drake is Robin, dfdsafj i dont know what else to put here
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-18 19:34:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29495130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/robinlikeitshot/pseuds/robinlikeitshot
Summary: The first time is simple. Small. Enough that he can brush it under the carpet and pretend that it doesn’t matter, but it does, it does so much because every single step brings him closer to—It starts simple. Tim is eleven years old.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 109





	1. XI

**Author's Note:**

> first off, this is multichaptered and ive got the second and third one written too, but updates after that will be extremely spotty. secondly, pls pls mind the tags, ur health matters much more than this fic, trust me if you think this might trigger you please dont read this  
> uhh okay so, i started this fic last year, and have been working on it everynow and then, it is very much a ventfic and based off my own experiences, and will eventually circle over to a sort of getting better arc because i need to write that lmao. i dont know when, but it'll get there. its unbetaed because I've been too nervous to show it to anyone lol, so there are probs a few spelling errors, but i hope you guys like it!

The first time is simple. Small. Enough that he can brush it under the carpet and pretend that it doesn’t matter, but it does, it does so much because every single step brings him closer to—

It starts simple. Tim is eleven years old. His parents have come home earlier in the day. He has been grounded to his room without dinner and he can hear them talking through Drake Manor’s thin walls. They’re laughing. They sound happy. Why can’t they be happy with him, too? Tim doesn’t even know what he did wrong.

No, that’s a lie, he chides himself. Tim knows exactly what he did wrong, and even though he doesn’t want to think about it he dredges it up anyway, because he deserves to relive the shame.

Tim, like an idiot, had asked his mom if she wanted to see his photographs later tonight. He’d been so excited, palms practically sweating as he’d grinned up at her. But she’d said no. She’d said that she was busy tonight, and ‘Maybe tomorrow, Timothy.’ She hadn’t even been looking at Tim.

Tim realizes he’s shaking, hunched up on the floor at the corner of his bed, because he doesn’t deserve to lie on the soft mattress after the things he’d said to her, his own mother, who worked for months on end so that he could live in such a nice house, have food and water, a good education, why was he so _selfish_ —

A soft thud from outside makes him flinch, head shooting up. Tim takes himself in, his wet face and collar, his hitching chest, and immediately scrambles up. If they see him like this, then there will be at least two more people more disappointed with him than he already is with himself. Still, Tim can’t seem to make himself stop, so, mind racing, he runs to the bathroom and shuts the door. It doesn’t make much of a difference in terms of volume, but at least the bathroom has a lock.

Hoisting himself up onto the empty counter next to the sink, Tim curls up in a little ball again, scooting back till he’s leaning up against the mirror that makes up the back wall. He muffles the noises he’s learned to make quiet as he replays the fight for the sixth time.

“You always say that!” Tim remembers shouting. “For all I know, you’ll be on a plane to, to Madrid before I even wake up tomorrow!”

His dad had stood up then, and Tim muffles a gasp by shoving the cloth of his maroon sweater in his mouth. He’d said, “Don’t talk to your mother like that.” And Tim knows, he should have just apologized, should have bowed his head and rolled over—

Instead he’d spat back, “It’s not like I get any other time to talk to her, so I think this is as good as any.”

Tim shudders again, digging his nails into his palm. How could he have _done_ that, something he’d been taught against for his whole _life_? Had he really become that much of a failure already?

The sound of footsteps makes Tim pause, choking the hiccups in his throat before he can give himself away. He hears a soft giggle outside, his mom saying, “Come _on_ , Jack. He’s probably gone to sleep anyway…”

Tim suddenly feels like he’s going to be sick, so after he very carefully hears the sound of their footsteps fade away, he goes to push himself off the counter. That’s when he notices that his fingernails are sticky with blood.

Eyes wide, he fumbles with the light, squinting at its bright glare when he can finally flick it on. His left palm streaked lightly with red; he must have dug his nails in too much. Fascinatedly, Tim watches a small drop ooze out of the little cut his indent finger had made, and he reaches up, pressing down a little for that small hiss of pain, the brief reprieve it gave him from the mind-numbing crushing weight of his parents’ disappointment.

That’s the moment he snaps out of it. _What is he doing_? Fuck, he can’t—he can’t be—Tim can only imagine their faces if they see how weak he’s become, how low he’s gotten that he, he just—no.

No, see this is fine, Tim reasons. He washes his hand with cold water from the sink and stares as the pink water finally runs clear. It’s fine. It’s fine because it was just a little accident. It doesn’t matter, not at all, it didn’t _mean_ anything. Tim eventually has to take a towel with him to his bedroom because the cut doesn’t stop bleeding.

It was just an accident. Right.

And so Tim puts the Batman themed band-aide box back in its place at the bottom of the heap of clothes in his closet, sticks a Robin one on his palm, and goes to sleep on the floor wrapped up in the slightly bloodied towel.


	2. XIV

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i lied im terribly impatient, have another yall

He keeps his promise, or rather his silent agreement with himself for almost three years. Tim can’t help but look back on it with amusement, because he was a good liar, but not to _himself_.

Tim is fourteen years old, his parents have left on some other trip, Haiti or something—he’d stopped obsessively tacking pins on the map hung up in the study after he’d picked up his first camera—and he’d let a rowdy drunk get a hit on him during patrol, bruising his face. Bruce hasn’t spoken to him all the way back to the Cave, and it seems even Alfred had a disappointed slant to his eyes when he’d prodded his cheek to check for cracks.

Tim can tell, they’re disappointed, they’re disappointed because when he takes off his mask it’s not Bruce’s son underneath, not Alfred’s grandson, not Barbara’s little brother— To be honest, he’s a little disappointed with himself, too.

He’s a failure. It always comes back to that one point, so it has to be true, right? It’s just what Tim is, and no amount of pretending is going to win back trust from the street kids that had immediately known Tim wasn’t the same Robin, from Dick’s friends who had watched the boy who they’d seen their best friend mourn over get replaced, and certainly not Jason’s family.

Sometimes, Tim thinks they hate him. Sometimes Tim thinks that he hates Tim too, though, so he can’t really blame them for that.

When Bruce dismisses him with a grunt, telling him to ‘go back home, Tim’ ( _we don’t need you, Tim, go away, Tim, we don’t need you, we never wanted you, God I wish you’d never been bo—_ ), Tim’s not really sure how to tell him that he doesn’t have a home to go back to. Well, no, he’s being dramatic. But his parents aren’t there, and no matter how much sometimes they make him want to pull the hair out of his skull till he’s as bald as a Luthor, being alone is even worse.

And besides, they had forgotten to order the groceries for this week (or at least, Tim _thinks_ they’ve forgotten, they wouldn’t actually—would they? No, no, of course not, they wouldn’t. No way.) and Tim’d really been hoping to grab one of Alfie’s snacks to hold him off till lunch at school tomorrow. Except for now asking anything from anyone in this house makes his stomach twist, and a hint of bile crawl up his throat.

So he just tells Alfred that he’ll train for a little longer before going back to the manor through the cave exit, so he doesn’t have to bother Bruce upstairs. Alfred frowns at him, though. “Are you sure, Master Timothy?” he asks.

Was this a test? H-He’d thought he’d passed those, though, why— No, no time to waste, he has to answer correctly. “Yes, Alfred, of course,’ and smile here, ‘really, you can go upstairs, I’ll be fine to pick up after myself. Don’t worry about it.”

Alfred nods, before resting a careful hand on Tim’s shoulder. “I hope it may not be impertinent for me to say so, Master Timothy, but I think you should take it a bit more easy in training. Master Bruce may not say so, but your mistake tonight was only from overwork. Go home, and get some rest. You will feel better in the morning.”

Tim mechanically nods and smiles. Inside though, he feels like curling up on his bathroom counter again and sobbing. He wasn’t good enough, he put as much effort into training as possible and he still failed. Even _Alfred_ thought so.

When the door for the clock door shuts, Tim gets up. Bypassing the hand wraps, he goes to stand in front of the brawling trainers, human-shaped androids that were controlled by level-settings. Tim stands in the middle of the mat, in nothing but his green tights and undershirt. He knows what the levels are to him, knows that to even surpass medium he’d need his bo staff and all his armor on him. Still, Tim calls out to the system, voice perfectly clear, “Setting: High No. 67.”

The bots immediately spring into action, five of them waking up to rush him. Tim gives back as much as he’s got, coughing a little as one of them gets a hit on his diaphragm. The others take the lead, and even flipping into the air with a shoulder as leverage doesn’t work to evade them, since, he remembers vaguely, the bots could hover at high levels. He gets dragged down, but Tim still remains quiet as he struggles, pain blooming across his body as he takes hit after hit.

A grin forces itself across his face, bloody and bruised as a hit to his shoulder leaves a shuddering streak of _hurt_ inside him. But the thing is, that when he feels that, everything else, the failure, the disappointment, the guilt, the hurt, the shame, they all just… go away. The laugh turns into a splutter when he gets kicked in the windpipe.

The bots aren’t programmed to kill, but Tim, with a growing interest, is a little curious as to how far they’re willing to go.

An angry, cold voice to his right nips that thought in the bud.

“What do you think you’re doing?” The voice doesn’t raise above a normal speaking pattern, nor does the speaker’s usual intonation change. But it still feels like a shout nonetheless, as Tim lies gasping on the mats when the bots immediately turn off and return to their previous positions.

Bruce’s glare is too much to bear, so Tim closes his eyes. He’s glad he doesn’t have to see the face that accompanies the words when he says, “Go _home_ , Tim.”

Tim goes home, but he’s back again the next day. Bruce goes back to not-looking at him, and Alfred pretends not to notice that the circles under his eyes have gotten darker.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hope you liked it! next one will be up soon~


	3. XIV II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> But it scares him. He’s never—well he has, but not, never like this. Tim’s scared.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im bad at pacing myself, but this is my last prepped chapter so here ya go!  
> hope you like it, pls drop a comment below if you do, i do absolutely adore reading them :D

It’s only the third time when Tim finally accepts what he’s doing. But, his mom is dead. His mom is dead and he hadn’t even seen her off on her last trip because he was at their neighbor’s house. God, could he even be a worse son?

His dad is still alive though. In a coma. Tim doesn’t know how to feel about it, but he does know that, while he clenches Dick’s hand in his own and looks down at his dad who has about a dozen different wires sticking out of him, he feels like crying. A lot. He can’t seem weak, though, especially not to Dick, who had only started calling him ‘little brother’ last week.

Dick’s arms tug him in, and Tim finds his face conveniently hidden in the man’s chest. “It’s okay, baby,” and somehow that doesn’t sound condescending, “It’s okay to be sad.”

Somehow that confirmation unlocks the dam behind his eyes, and Tim gives out an embarrassingly loud cry, much too loud for the hospital room of his comatose father. He immediately reigns in the waterworks, mutters, “Sorry,” into the silk of Dick’s dark blue suit shirt, the one he’d worn to the funeral that morning. Tim was wearing his own outfit too.

“It’s okay, Timmy, you don’t have to be sorry,” is murmured as Dick wraps his arms even tighter around him. And Tim, he wants to believe him, but he’s wrong. He does have to be sorry. He has whole _lists_ for God’s sake, even ones that he only made up this morning; it’s his fault his mom died, his dad is in a coma, it’s his fault that he didn’t even have the decency to say goodbye to her before she left, it’s his that they’d even felt the need to leave their own home, because they had to get away from him. It’s his fault that his face was desert dry that morning, even watching his own mother’s pale white face disappear beneath ever-rising dirt.

Later. Later when he’s at the hotel room he’s placed under his fake-uncle’s alias, when he’s tucked himself into a corner in the bathroom because even if this room has a lock he still feels safer like this. Later when he’s holding his mom’s sharpened letter opener in his hand, the warm yellow of the vanity lights glancing off the thin metal edge. He places the blade against one of the scabs on his knuckles and takes a breath.

Why is he doing this? Because they’re gone, and it’s his fault, it’s his fault that they felt like their only child didn’t love them when they died—when _she_ died. He’s doing this because he deserves it, the faint scar, as a reminder for what he’s done. And he’s doing this because it’s _good_ , because he’s selfish, because the pain offers the only moment of clarity in the fog of his head.

Tim takes a breath, and he quickly flicks his hand. Immediately a gasp wrenches its way out of a hidden place in his chest as he watches a little rivulet of blood drip off his finger from underneath the edge of the small incision and onto the perfectly white tiles of the bathroom floor. He prefers the dark wood of his, at Drake Manor’s, better, he thinks.

But it scares him. He’s never—well he has, but not, never like this. Tim’s scared.

He washes the blood off the knife and dries it, setting it away at the very back of one of the drawers. Then he washes his hand, pointedly not looking at his own ragged reflection in the mirror.

Because Tim’s afraid, afraid that he doesn’t know where to draw the line, afraid of the concessions this is going to make, afraid of what’ll happen if the Bats find out, afraid of what this small little action implies. Mainly, though, Tim thinks he’s afraid of himself.

**Author's Note:**

> next chapter will probably be up whenever i get the nerve to post it lmao, hope you guys liked it! let me know ur thoughts down in the comments, ill mention i wont be responding to any comments or anything for reasons but i do read all of them and adore each and every one!


End file.
